Family Stories

I've been doing genealogy long enough to know that not everyone is excited to learn about pedigree collapse in their own family tree. It can feel uncomfortable, even alarming, the first time you spot it - two lines on your pedigree chart that should stay separate, quietly merging into the same ancestor. But here's the thing every genealogist eventually learns: pedigree collapse isn't a scandal. It's math. What Pedigree Collapse Actually Is In theory, your family tree doubles

"Cliff was shaking pecans out of the trees for the pickers to sack and sell in Blackwell, Kay County, Oklahoma."

A delightful message landed in my Ancestry inbox from a woman who had come across an old newspaper article mentioning members of the Melick family in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. She thoughtfully passed it along to Melick researchers like me. How kind of her to take a few extra minutes to do that.